Title: Joining automatic query expansion based on thesaurus and word sense disambiguation using WordNet

Authors: Francisco Joao Pinto, Antonio Farina Martinez, Carme Fernandez Perez-Sanjulian

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina s/n, A Coruna, 15071, Spain. ' Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruna, Campus de Elvina s/n, A Coruna, 15071, Spain. ' Department of Galician-Portuguese, French, and Linguistics, University of A Coruna, Campus da Zapateira s/n, A Coruna, 15071, Spain

Abstract: The selection of the most appropriate sense of an ambiguous word in a certain context is one of the main problems in Information Retrieval (IR). For this task, it is usually necessary to count on a semantic source, that is, linguistic resources like dictionaries, thesaurus, etc. Using a methodology based on simulation under a vector space model, we show that the use of automatic query expansion and disambiguation of the sense of the words permits to improve retrieval effectiveness. As shown in our experiments, query expansion is not able by itself to improve retrieval. However, when it is combined with Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), that is, when the correct meaning of a word is chosen from among all its possible variations, it leads to effectiveness improvements.

Keywords: automatic query expansion; thesaurus; word sense disambiguation; WordNet; queries; ambiguous words; information retrieval; simulation; vector space models; retrieval effectiveness.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2008.022422

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2008 Vol.33 No.4, pp.271 - 279

Published online: 04 Jan 2009 *

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